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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2011, Tony celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM Storage on the same day as the IBM's Centennial. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

Continuing my coverage of the Data Center Conference, held Dec 1-4 in Las Vegas, an analyst presented the challenges of managing the rapid growth in storage capacity. Administrators ability to manage storage is not keeping up with the growth. His recommendations:

Aim to just meet but not exceed service level agreements (SLAs)

Revisit past IT decisions. This includes evaluating your SAN to NAS ratio.

Embrace new technologies when they are effective, this includes cloud storage, solid state drives, and interconnect technologies like FCoCEE.

Throughout the industry, storage vendors are following IBM's example of using commodity hardware parts. This is because custom ASICs are expensive, and changes take a minimum of three months development time. Software-based implementations can be updated more quickly.

In terms of technologies deployed of SAN, NAS, Compliance Archive (such as the IBM Information Archive), and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) such as the IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER data deduplications solution, here was the survey of the audience:

8 percent: SAN only

14 percent: SAN and NAS

23 percent: SAN, NAS and Compliance Archive

9 percent: SAN and VTL

14 percent: SAN, NAS and VTL

32 percent: SAN, NAS, Compliance Archive and VTL

Cost reduction techniques including thin provisioning, compression, data deduplication, Quality of Service tiers, and archiving. To reduce power and cooling requirements, switch from FC to SATA disk wherever possible, and move storage out of the data center, such as on tape cartridges or cloud storage.

50 percent have no plans, and will continue to stick with traditional storage technologies

As for adopting Cloud storage, here was the survey:

14 percent already have

31 percent plan to use Cloud storage in 12-24 months

13 percent plan to use Cloud storage in 24-48 months

42 percent have no plans to adopt Cloud storage

My take-away from this is that many companies are still "exploring" into different options available to them. Fortunately, IBM offers a broad portfolio of complete end-to-end solutions to make acquiring the right mix of technologies that are optimized for your workloads possible.

On the host side, TS7680 connects to mainframe systems running z/OS or z/VM over FICON attachment, emulating an automated tape library with 3592-J1A devices. The TS7680 includes two controllers that emulate the 3592 C06 model, with 4 FICON ports each. Each controller emulates up to 128 virtual 3592 tape drives, for a total of 256 virtual drives per TS7680 system. The mainframe sees up to 1 million virtual tape cartridges, up to 100GB raw capacity each, before compression. For z/OS, the automated library has full SMS Tape and Integrated Library Management capability that you would expect.

Inside, the two control units are both connected to a redundant pair cluster of ProtecTIER engines running the HyperFactor deduplication algorithm that is able to process the deduplication inline, as data is ingested, rather than post-process that other deduplication solutions use. These engines are similar to the TS7650 gateway machines for distributed systems.

On the back end, these ProtecTIER deduplication engines are then connected to external disk, up to 1PB. If you get 25x data deduplication ratio on your data, that would be 25PB of mainframe data stored on only 1PB of physical disk. The disk can be any disk supported by ProtecTIER over FCP protocol, not just the IBM System Storage DS8000, but also the IBM DS4000, DS5000 or IBM XIV storage system, various models of EMC and HDS, and of course the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) with all of its supported disk systems.

Now that the US Recession has been declared over, companies are looking to invest in IT again. To help you plan your upcoming investments, here are some upcoming events in April.

SNW Spring 2010, April 12-15

IBM is a Platinum Plus sponsor at this [Storage Networking World event], to be held April 12-15 at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Florida. If you are planning to go, here's what you can go look for:

IBM booth at the Solution Center featuring the DS8700 and XIV disk systems, SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud (SBSC), and various Tivoli storage software

IBM kiosk at the Platinum Galleria focusing on storage solutions for SAP and Microsoft environments

I have personally worked with Mark, Neville, Vincent and Gordon, so I am sure they will do a great job in their presentations. Sadly, I won't be there myself, but fellow blogger [Rich Swain from IBM] will be at the event to blog about all the actviities there.

The webinar will include client testimonials from various companies as well.

Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit, April 27-29

I will be there, at this this 2-and-a-half-day [Executive Summit] in Scottsdale, Arizona, to talk to company executives. Discover how IBM can help you manage your ever-increasing amount of information with an end-to-end, innovative approach to building a dynamic infrastructure. You will learn all of our innovative solutions and find out how you can effectively transform your enterprise for a smarter planet.

My colleagues, Harley Puckett (left) and Jack Arnold (right) were highlighted in today's Arizona Daily Star, our local newspaper, as part of an article on IBM's success and leadership in the IT storage industry. At 1400 employees here in Tucson, IBM is Southern Arizona's 36th largest employer.

This week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I am at the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the beautiful Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. This is a mix of indoor and outdoor meetings, one-on-ones with IBM executives, and main-tent sessions.

The Solutions Showcase will cover the following:

Smarter Systems

As the bar for performance gets higher and the need to manage, store and analyze massive amounts of information escalates, systems must scale to meet the needs of the business. The latest server and storage technology innovations including: POWER7, eX5, XIV, ProtecTIER, SONAS, and System z Solution Editions.

Smarter Data Centers

Today’s data centers are under extreme power and cooling pressures and space constraints. How can you get more out of your existing facility, while planning for future requirements? IBM energy efficiency consultants will tell you how you can reduce both CAPEX and OPEX costs and plan for future growth with consolidation and virtualization, energy efficient (energy star) equipment and modular data center solutions. Be sure to check out the IBM Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) that fits in a standard shipping crate!

Smarter Clouds

IBM’s Cloud Computing solutions provide you with flexible, dynamic, secure and cost-efficient delivery choices from pay-per-use (by the hour, week or year) at IBM cloud centers around the world, conditioning your infrastructure to build your own private cloud or out-of-the box cloud solutions that are quick and easy to deploy. Which workloads are the best fit for cloud computing? How do you decide which cloud computing is right for your organization? Cloud experts will talk about the options, give you recommendations based on your business objectives and help you get started.

Well, today's Tuesday, and you know what that means... IBM Announcements!

This week, IBM has their huge 3Q Launch. This on top of the [2Q results] IBM released yesterday. You can read how the rest of the company did, but it is good to see that IBM grew in both revenue and market share for storage!

As with any IBM launch of this magnitude, there are so many enhancements, I will spread them across several posts.

IBM System Storage TS7610 ProtecTIER® Deduplication Appliance Express

The TS7610 is a smaller appliance than the TS7650 we introduced last year, taking up only 3U of rack space (2U for the disk itself, and a 1U slide rail to simplify maintenance). This is designed for smaller deployments, such as midsized businesses between 100 and 1000 employees that backup 3TB of data per week or less. The unit relies on RAID protected SATA drives. Thanks to the same ProtecTIER data deduplication we have on the TS7650, the TS7610 can hold up to 135TB of backup data on just 5.4TB of disk capacity, with in-line data ingest at 80 MB/sec performance. This little Virtual Tape Library (VTL) emulates up to four TS3500 libraries, with 64 LTO-3 drives and over 8000 virtual tapes. See the [Announcement letter] for details.

The [ProtecTIER Entry Edition] offers a hub-and-spoke approach to replication. You can have up to twelve(12) TS7610 boxes (the "spokes") replicate to a central VTL (the "hub"). This can be ideal for protecting remote office or branch office deployments.

The DS5020 and EXP520 joins their bigger siblings DS5100 and DS5300 in supporting Solid State Drives (SSD), available in 73GB and 300GB capacities. A new air filter bezel is also available for these when used in dusty environments. See the [Announcement letter] for details.

For my friends down in Brazil, A new 2.8 meter length power cord that supports 220-250 volts is now available for all DS4000 and DS5000 series disk systems. Obrigado para o seu negócio!

IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager v2.2

I covered this latest release in my post [FlashCopy Manager v2.2] but the marketing team felt we should include it with this launch to get added exposure and visibility.

I'll try to get to the rest in separate posts over the rest of this week.

Today, IBM refreshed its IBM System Storage ProtecTIER data deduplication family with new hardware and software. On the hardware side, The [TS7650G gateway] now has 32 cores and 64GB RAM. The [TS7650 Appliance] now has 24 cores and 64GB of RAM, and the [TS7610 Appliance Express] has 4 cores and up to 16GB of RAM.

On the software side, all of these now support Symantec's proprietary "OpenStorage" OST API. This applies across the board, from the [Enterprise Edition], [Appliance Edition], and the [Entry Edition]. For those using Symantec NetBackup as their backup software, the OST API can provide advantages over the standard VTL interface.

IBM Systems Director Storage Control

The second announcement has an interesting twist. I could file this in my "I Told You So" folder. Offiically, it's called the [Cassandra Complex], where you accurately predict how something will turn out, but being unable to convince anyone else of what the future holds.

About ten years ago, I was asked to be lead architect of a new product to be called IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, which was later renamed to IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. This would combine three projects:

Tivoli Storage Resource Manager (TSRM)

Tivoli SAN Manager (TSANM)

Multiple Device Manager (MDM)

The first two were based on Tivoli's internal GUI platform, and the MDM was a plug-in for IBM Systems Director. I argued that administrators would want everything on a single pane of glass, and that we should bring all the components under a common GUI platform, such as IBM Systems Director. Unfortunately, management did not agree with me on that, and preferred instead to leave each interface alone to minimize development effort. The only "unification" was to give them all similar sounding names, four components packaged as single product:

Productivity Center for Data (formerly TSRM)

Productivity Center for Fabric (formerly TSANM)

Productivity Center for Disk (formerly MDM)

Productivity Center for Replication (formerly MDM)

While this management decision certainly allowed version 1 to hit the market sooner, this was not a good "first impression" of the product for many of our clients.

In 2002, IBM acquired Trellisoft, Inc. which replaced the internally-developed TSRM with a much better interface, but again, this was different GUI than the other components. A "launcher" was created that would launch the various disparate interfaces for each component for Version 2. At this point, we have different development teams scattered in five locations, with the first two components being developed by the Tivoli software team, and the other two components being developed by the System Storage hardware team.

Often times, when a technical lead architect and management do not agree, things do not end well. The lead architect has to leave the product, and management is forced to take alternative actions to keep the product going. In my case, management considered the idea of a common GUI as an expensive "nice-to-have" luxury we could not afford, but I considered this a "must-have". I moved on to a new job within IBM, and management, unable to continue without my leadership, gave up and handed the entire project over to the Tivoli Software team.

The Tivoli Software team took a whiff at the pile of code and agreed that it stunk. Dusting off my original design documents, they pretty much discarded most of the code and re-wrote much from scratch, with a common database, common app server, and common GUI platform. Unfortunately, Productivity Center for Replication was held up waiting for some hardware prerequisites, but the other three components would be packaged together as "Productivity Center v3 - Standard Edition" and was a big improvement over the prior versions.

In Version 4, TotalStorage Productivity Center was renamed to Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, and the Replication component was brought into the mix. A scaled-down version packaged as Productivity Center "Basic Edition" was made available as a hardware appliance named "System Storage Productivity Center" or SSPC. The idea was to provide a pre-installed 1U-high hardware console that had the basic functions of Productivity Center, with the option to upgrade to the full Tivoli Storage Productivity Center with just license keys.

So, now, years later, management recognizes that a common GUI platform is more than just a "nice-to-have". IBM now support three very specific use cases:

1. Administration for a single product

For small clients who might have only a single IBM product, IBM is now focused on making the GUI browser-based, specifically to work with the Mozilla Firefox browser, but any similar browser should work as well. The new IBM Storwize V7000 GUI is a good example of this.In this case, the browser serves as the common GUI platform.

2. Administration for both servers and storage devices

For mid-sized companies that have administrators managing both servers and storage, IBM announced this month the new [IBM Systems Director Storage Control v4.2.1] plug-in, which provides Tivoli Storage Productivity Center "Basic Edition" support. This allows admins already familiar with IBM Systems Director for managing their servers to also manage basic storage functions. This is the "I Told You So" moment, connecting server and storage administration under the IBM Systems Director management platform makes a lot of sense, it did when I came up with the idea 10 years ago! Hmmmm?

3. Administration for just the storage environment

For larger companies big enough to have separate server and storage admin teams, IBM continues to offer the full Tivoli Storage Productivity Center product for the storage admins. The most recent release enhanced the support for IBM DS8000, SVC, Storwize V7000 and XIV storage systems.

Today, analysts consider IBM's [Tivoli Storage Productivity Center] one of the leading products in its category. I am glad my original vision has finally come to life, even though it took a while longer than I expected.

To learn more about IBM storage hardware, software or services, see the updated [IBM System Storage] landing page.

Continuing my post-week coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Wednesday morning started with another keynote session, followed by some break-out sessions.

Realities of IT Investment

Tighter budgets mean more business decisions. Future investments will come from cost savings. The analysts report that 77 percent of IT decisions are made by CFOs. Most organizations are spending less now than back in 2008 before the recession.

How we innovate through IT is changing. In bad times, risk trumps return, but only 21 percent of the audience have a formal "risk calculation" as part of their purchase plans.

Divestment matters as much as investment. Reductions in complexity have the greatest long-term cost savings. Try to retire at least 20 percent of your applications next year. With the advent of Cloud Computing, companies might just retire it and go entirely with public cloud offerings. Note that this graph the years are different than the ones above, in groups of half-decade increments.

It is important to identify functional dependencies and link your IT risks to business outcomes. Focus on making costs visible, and re-think how you communicate IT performance measurements and their impact to business. Try to change the culture and mind-set so that projects are not referred to as "IT projects" focused on technology, but rather they are "business projects" focused on business results.

Moving to the Cloud

Richard Whitehead from Novell presented challenges in moving to Cloud Computing. There are risks and challenges managing multiple OS environments. Users should have full access to all IT resources they need to do their jobs. Computing should be secure, compliant, and portable. Here is the shift he sees from physical servers to virtual and cloud deployments, years 2010 to 2015:

Richard considers a "workload" as being the combination of the operating system, middleware, and application. He then defines "Business Service" as an appropriate combination of these workloads. For example, a business service that provides a particular report might involve a front-end application, talking through business logic workload server, talking to a back-end database workload server.

To address this challenge, Novell introduces "Intelligent Workload Management", called WorkloadIQ. This manages the lifecycle to build, secure, deploy, manage and measure each workload. Their motto was to take the mix of physical, virtual and cloud workloads all "make it work as one". IBM is a business partner with Novell, and I am a big fan of Novell's open-source solutions including SUSE Linux.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cloud....

Bud Albers, CTO of Disney, shared their success in deploying their hybrid cloud infrastructure. Everyone recognizes the Disney brand for movies and theme parks, but may not aware that they also own ABC News and ESPN television, Travel cruises, virtual worlds, mobile sites, and deploy applications like Fantasy Football and Fantasy Fishing.

Two years ago, each Line of Business (LOB) owned their own servers, they were continually out of space, power and HVAC issues forced tactical build-outs of their datacenters. But in 2008, the answer to all questions was Cloud Computing, it slices and dices like something invented by [Ron Popeill], with no investment or IT staff required. However, continuing to ask the CFO for CAPEX to purchase assets that were only 1/7th used was not working out either. That's right, over 75 percent of their servers were running less than 15 percent CPU utilization.

The compromise was named "D*Cloud". Internal IT infrastructure would be positioned for Cloud Computing, by adopting server virtualization, implementing REST/SOAP interfaces, and replicating the success across their various Content Distribution Networks (CDN). Disney is no stranger to Open Source software, using Linux and PHP. Their [Open Source] web page shows tools available from Disney Animation studios.

At the half-way point, they had half their applications running virtualized on just 4 percent of their servers. Today, they run over 20 VMs per host and have 65 percent of their apps virtualized. Their target is 80 percent of their apps virtualized by 2014.

Bud used the analogy that public clouds will be the "gas stations" of the IT industry. People will choose the cheapest gas among nearby gas stations. By focusing on "Application management" rather than "VM instance management", Disney is able to seamlessly move applications as needed from private to public cloud platforms.

Their results? Disney is now averaging 40 percent CPU utilization across all servers. Bud feels they have achieved better scalability, better quality of service, and increased speed, all while saving money. Disney is spending less on IT now than in 2008,

UPMC Maximizes Storage Efficiency with IBM

Kevin Muha, UPMC Enterprise Architect & Technology Manager for Storage and Data Protection Services, was unable to present this in person, so Norm Protsman (IBM) presented Kevin's charts on the success at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center [UPMC]. UPMC is Western Pennsylvania's largest employer, with roughly 50,000 employees across 20 hospitals, 400 doctors' offices and outpatient sites. They have frequently been rated one of the best hospitals in the US.

Their challenge was storage growth. Their storage environment had grown 328 percent over the past three years, to 1.6PB of disk and nearly 7 PB of physical tape. To address this, UPMC deployed four IBM TS7650G ProtecTIER gateways (2 clusters) and three XIV storage systems for their existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) environment. Since they were already using TSM over a Fibre Channel SAN, the implementation took only three days.

UPMC was backing up nearly 60TB per day, in a 15-hour back window. Their primary data is roughly 60 percent Oracle, with the rest being a mix of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and unstructured data such as files and images.

Their results? TSM reclamation is 30 percent faster. Hardware footprint reduced from 9 tiles to 5. Over 50 percent reduction in recovery time for Oracle DB, and 20 percent reduction in recovery of SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Epic Cache. They average 24:1 deduplication overall, which can be broken down by data category as follows:

29:1 Cerner Oracle

18:1 EPIC Cache

10:1 Microsoft SQL Server

8:1 Unstructured files

6:1 Microsoft Exchange

UPMC still has lots of LTO-4 tapes onsite and offsite from before the change-over, so the next phase planned is to implement "IP-based remote replication" between ProtecTIER gateways to a third data center at extended distance. The plan is to only replicate the backups of production data, and not replicate the backups of test/dev data.

During lunch, people were able to take a look at our solutions. Here are Dan Thompson and Brett Cooper striking a pose.

Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery

The afternoon was kicked off by Dr. Daniel Sabbah, IBM General Manager of Tivoli software. He started with some shocking statistics: 42 percent of small companies have experienced data loss, 32 percent have lost data forever. IBM has a solution that offers "Unified Recovery Management". This involves a combination of periodic backups, frequent snapshots, and remote mirroring.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) was introduced in 1993, and was the first backup software solution to support backup to disk storage pools. Today, TSM is now also part of Cloud Computing services, including IBM Information Protection Services. IBM announced today a new bundle called IBM Storwize Rapid Application Backup, which combines IBM Storwize V7000 midrange disk system, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager, implementation services, with a full three-year hardware and software warranty. This could be used, for example, to protect a Microsoft Exchange email system with 9000 mailboxes.

IBM also announced that its TS7600 ProtecTIER data deduplication solutions have been enhanced to support many-to-many bi-direction remote mirroring. Last year, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) reported that they were average 24x data deduplication factor in their environment using IBM ProtecTIER.

"You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape!"
-- Dick Crosby, Director of System Administration, Estes

The new IBM TS1140 enterprise class tape drive process 2.3 TB per hour, and provides a density of 1.2 PB per square foot. The new 3599 tape media can hold 4TB of data uncompressed, which could hold up to 10TB at a 2.5x compression ratio.

The United States Golfers Association [USGA] uses IBM's backup cloud, which manages over 100PB of data from 750 locations across five continents.

Customer Testimonial - Graybar

Randy Miller, Manager of Technical System Administration at Graybar, provided the next client testimonial. Graybar is an employee-owned company focused on supply-chain management, serving as a distributor for electical, lighting, security, power and cooling equipment.

Their problem was that they had 240 different locations, and expecting local staff to handle tape backups was not working out well. They centralized their backups to their main data center. In the event that a system fails in one of their many remote locations, they can rebuild a new machine at their main data center across high-speed LAN, and then ship overnight to the remote location. The result, the remote location has a system up and running by 10:30am, faster than they would have had from local staff trying to figure out how to recover from tape. In effect, Graybar had implemented a "private cloud" for backup in the 1990s, long before the concept was "cool" or "popular".

In 2001, they had an 18TB SAP ERP application data repository. To back this up, they took it down for 1 minute per day, six days a week, and 15 minutes down on Sundays. The result was less than 99.8 percent availability. To fix this, they switched to XIV, and use Snapshots that are non-disruptive and do not impact application performance.

Over 85 percent of the servers at Graybar are virtualized.

Their next challenge is Disaster Recovery. Currently, they have two datacenters, one in St. Louis and the other in Kansas City. However, in the aftermath of Japan's earthquakes, they realize there is a nuclear power plan between their two locations, so a single incident could impact both data centers. They are working with IBM, their trusted advisors, to investigate a three-site solution.

This week, May 15-22, I am in Auckland, New Zealand teaching IBM Storage Top Gun sales class. Next week, I will be in Sydney, Australia.

Since Clod Barrera introduced IBM's Smarter Computing initiative during yesterday's keynote session, I took it to the next lower level, with a presentation on how IBM's Storage Strategy aligns with the Smarter Computing approach.

Deduplication -- It's Not Magic, It's Math!

Local IBMer Paul Rizio presented this high-level session on the concepts of data deduplication, and how it is implemented in IBM's N series, TSM and ProtecTIER virtual tape libraries. I first met Paul earlier this year when we were both instructors at Top Gun classes we held in Auckland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia.

IBM Information Archive for files, email and eDiscovery

This was a reprise of my presentation that I gave last July in Orlando, Florida (see my blog post [IBM Storage University - Day 1]). I explained the differences between backup and archive, the differences between Tivoli Storage Manager and System Storage Archive Manager, and the Information Archive (IA) The Information Archive for files, email and eDiscovery bundle combines IA hardware with content collectors for files and email, eDiscovery analyzer and eDiscovery manager software.

What are Industry Consultants saying about IBM Storage?

Vic Peltz, from our IBM Almaden Research Center, presented this lively presentation on how IT industry analysts gather their information and structure their findings into various models. For many in the audience, this would be their first exposure to concepts like a "Magic Quadrant", "MarketScope" and the various stages of the "Hype Cycle".

IBM SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud

The title of this session just rolls off my tongue, similar to "James and the Giant Peach" or "Harold and the Purple Crayon". I had presented this back in July (see my blog post [IBM Storage University - Cloud Storage]). This time, I had updated the materials to reflect the new SONAS R1.3 release, and the new IBM SmartCloud offerings announced last month.

Of course the big news is that U.S. President Barack Obama is here in Australia, with a stop in Canberra (not far from Melbourne), followed by a stop in Darwin on the north side of this country. This is his first official visit to Australia as president.

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means... IBM announcements!

Last week, IBM had a big storage launch of various products, with the June 4 announcements at the IBM Edge 2012 conference. I provided highlights in my post [IBM Edge Announcements]. As promised, here are the rest of the announcements.

SONAS v1.3.2

SONAS v1.3.2 adds support for management by the newly announced IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v5.1 release. Also, IBM now officially supports "Gateway configurations" that have the storage nodes connected to XIV or Storwize v7000 disk systems. These gateway configurations offer new flexible choices and options for our ever-expanding set of clients.

ProtecTIER appliances and gateways

IBM ProtecTIER line of data deduplication appliances and gateways add CIFS file system support. Rather than using OST or a VTL interface, you now have CIFS as a new option for host attach. Also, IBM introduces the new TS7620 Express model, with options for 5.4TB and 11TB in capacity, replacing the previous TS7610 entry level.

LTFS Storage Manager

The Linear Tape File System (LTFS) allows files to be stored on tape cartridges in a manner that allows them to be mounted as file systems, much like a USB memory stick. The new LTFS Storage Manager software allows you to manage a collection of files across a set of cartridges, moving files from one cartridge to another, consolidating valid data onto fewer cartridges, and removing files no longer needed. This is sometimes referred to as "lifecycle management".

Tape System Library Manager

When IBM first introduced the "shuttle" that allowed up to fifteen TS3500 tape libraries to be connected together into a single system, only HPSS customers could take advantage of this. Software was required to coordinate the movement of cartridges from one library to another. The new IBM Tape System Library Manager now offers an alternative to HPSS for coordinating this activity.

DS8000 v6.3 microcode

IBM now offers 400GB solid-state drives. IBM's market leading support for Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is now extended to cover all drive speeds, from the slowest 7200RPM NL-SAS drives up to the fastest solid-state. IBM Easy Tier extends its super-easy implementation to work across all three of these tiers including encryption.

Implementation Services

IBM now offers implementation services for IBM XIV Gen3 storage system, and the N series models 3220 and 3240.

This week I am on the road visiting various clients. Next week, Moscow Russia for the "Edge Comes to You" event!